The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice

Isaac Ahimbisibwe, Adam Altmejd, Georgy Artemov, Andrés Barrios-Fernández, Aspasia Bizopoulou, Martti Kaila, Jin-Tan Liu, Rigissa Megalokonomou, José Montalbán, Christopher A. Neilson, Sebastián Otero, Jintao Sun, Xiaoyang Ye, "The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice", Economics of Education Review, 2026.

@article{ stem-major-gender-gaps_2026,
  title = "The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice",
  author = "Ahimbisibwe, Isaac and Altmejd, Adam and Artemov, Georgy and Barrios-Fernández, Andrés and Bizopoulou, Aspasia and Kaila, Martti and Liu, Jin-Tan and Megalokonomou, Rigissa and Montalbán, José and Neilson, Christopher A. and Otero, Sebastián and Sun, Jintao and Ye, Xiaoyang",
  journal = "Economics of Education Review",
  year = "2026",
  note = "rr"
,
  abstract = "Women make up only 35% of STEM graduates worldwide, a share unchanged for a decade. We separate two sources of this gap: gender differences in academic preparation (the pipeline) and in application decisions (the choice gap). We use data from ten centralized university admissions systems where eligibility is set by academic performance and places are assigned through variants of deferred acceptance, so students have little incentive to misreport. We focus on high-achieving students, for whom access constraints are least likely to bind, which isolates application behavior from the most obvious barriers. The pipeline gap varies widely, from a female disadvantage in Uganda to a female advantage in Sweden, and broadly tracks labor-market gender parity. The choice gap does not. It is large and negative everywhere: even among top scorers, women are about 24 percentage points less likely than men to rank a STEM program first, and the gap exceeds 20 points in eight of the ten settings. The pattern holds when STEM is counted anywhere on the list, not only first. Closing the pipeline gap entirely would still leave high-achieving STEM applicants majority male, between 57% and 75%, in every setting we study."
,
  url = "https://www.christopher-neilson.com/work/documents/STEM_Gender_Gap_Pipeline_vs_Choice_2026.pdf"
,
  url_article = "https://www.christopher-neilson.com/work/documents/STEM_Gender_Gap_Pipeline_vs_Choice_2026.pdf"
}